Recently, the amount of data stored in the information systems has been increasing tremendously; therefore, amount of storage needed by companies and/or organizations is also significantly increasing. As with other sizeable business expense, it may be desirable to reduce cost of managing and maintaining a storage system. Further, simplified use of complex storage environment may be one of the biggest customer challenges today. Furthermore, an explosive growth of data storage and/or massive proliferation of file servers and Network-Attached Storage (NAS) appliances may have created a management nightmare for storage administrators. The most complex issue involving the growth of data storage may be the inability to manage storage environments efficiently.
Currently, every file server is an independent file system that can require individual management on a regular basis. These file servers can require applications to select and name the specific hardwired server hosting the desired files. Typically, when applications outgrow the storage provided by a file server, IT (Information Technology) administrators must bring down the applications, add new storage devices, partition and move some of the data, and/or reprogram the applications to make them aware of the new division of resources.
For example, in storage technology, such as NAS, adding a first file server may be generally easy. However, adding a second file server can again require setting up network shares and informing users of its existence so that they can mount/map to the second file server. Thus, each successive server addition in the NAS can require additional administrative setup and may result in operational complexities for the IT administrators and/or users. This not only is an administrative overhead but can also cause added difficulties for users and applications to navigate via these multiple file systems located in several storage devices.
Typically, accessing files in the NAS may require knowing exact share where they are located; cross-volume data search can be difficult and if files are moved or storage reconfigured for load balancing, user access can be interrupted. Further, each NAS device sitting on a LAN can have a limited throughput as it is an island unto itself. IT administrators have to statically partition the storage among these islands, which can have a number of unpalatable consequences.
Generally, procured storage environments grow heterogeneously, as the IT administrators may not want to get locked into a specific vendor. Further, storage environments are going towards multi-site organizations with geographically distributed business units under different administrative domains. The required ongoing investments in both hardware/software and people into these storage environments continue to rise. Many organizations are looking for alternative solutions to reduce the cost by maximizing utilization of resources across the globe through the use of Grid computing.
Today, organizations need to consider new storage management strategies based on performance, intelligent systems, and/or sophisticated software that can enable the management of existing data and/or existing networks while increasing uptime and reducing the cost of data storage. Currently, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) is a technique that is used for efficiently managing large amounts of data. In this technique files/data are assigned to various storage media based on how fast and/or how frequently they are needed. However, HSM of data during lifecycle of files and/or folders can be a challenging task as there may be a need to migrate files from one storage to another based on dynamic conditions.
The main challenge can be how to manage large amounts of data that is constantly increasing in volume, and at the same time to control the cost associated with the data management while trying to lower the total cost of ownership.
Current techniques for integrating file systems by providing a global namespace across storage environments are generally appliance solutions that can either require a custom hardware and/or meta-data servers for performing mapping of the virtual store to physical store which can be a limiting scalability solution. Further, the current techniques may fail to support multiple file system, stored on different back ends. Furthermore, the current techniques generally fail to assimilate existing file systems and can require custom hardware to provide scalable solutions as they use stateful servers. Moreover, the current techniques may fail to support heterogeneous platforms and/or storage elements. Also, the current techniques may not provide data migration coupled with virtualization.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.